Our El Sistema Resident Artists, Dr. Brad Barrett, and Kat Jara were thrilled to have had the opportunity to present at the Sphinx Connect conference. They shared the incredible work that they do at CLCS to develop students’ creative practice and their voice as artists who use their art to comment on the world around them.
In their discussion on Artistic Citizenship, Kat and Brad addressed the following:
“As policymakers and educators routinely note, community participation, critical thinking, and creative problem solving are not effectively cultivated in the current US education system. Intellectual processes supported by the arts can be a potential solution to this problem. Through the arts, students in high-quality programs learn to develop and discern their ideas and connect their perspectives to broader civic discourses. However, traditional approaches to music education, those that emphasize technique at the expense of creative thinking, will not necessarily meet this goal. Students in community-based arts programs must be taught to use the arts as a means to craft new and diverse perspectives across lines of historical and socio-economic difference. We argue that the skills (critical thinking, reflection, creativity) and experiences (voice, participation, community) engendered through community-based music education and taught by teaching artists active in their fields are increasingly relevant to supporting the civic voice and actions needed to productively participate in modern political discourses.”
Watch the full discussion below: